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I've seen it all

My name is Dean. I'm a student at a Bible college where I'm taking a course on Apologetics, which is the defense of the Christian faith. My professor gave us your web-site and asked us to check it out and to try to respond to some of the articals. It sounds easy enough, but when I came to this site and started reading the personal testimonies, my heart was broken. These testimonies are the most important material on this web-site. We could argue for the rest of our lives siting scientist after scientist and philosopher after philosopher.

We could talk about history, archeology, and biology until we are all blue in the face but the only thing that can not be disputed is someone's testimony because it is real to them. I've read so many testimonies on this web-site about people who have been decieved, demoralized, cheated, disallusioned, and generally mistreated by people and organizations flying the Christian banner. The bad part for me is that I believe it all because I've seen it all. As a child my mother draged me to almost every denomination of Christian church that there is along with the occational trip to see the latest, greatest traveling evangelist slash healer of the time. So many beliefs, so many contradictions, so much conflict, so much judgement, so much hippocracy, and so much rejection.

The good thing for me, however, is that somehow I didn't turn away from God. All this experiance made me look to see what God had to say about all this garbage. What did the Bible say is right, not man. Once I had done this, things suddenly became clear to me. Even though one of the main objectives of Christianity is to be like Christ, we can never acheive it. I realized that I was holding these people to a higher standard than myself because they claimed to be Christians, but they were still people and a person who makes no mistakes is a person who does nothing. So I learned to live with the mistakes of others and myself and to seek God's word for real truth. The change in me was real and complete and my life has not been the same since. I still do a lot of things wrong (this whole letter is probably wrong) and I still mistreat people, but it's about 10% as bad as it ever was. That's pretty good buy any standard and I'm getting better all the time. That's my testimony and it is very real to me.

I want to end this letter by apologizing to all of you who were ever mistreated in any way by a Christian or Christain organization. Often times we forget that we are the only representation of Christanity that people see. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm trying to make excuses for people, it's just that sometimes we (as people) misrepresent Christ.